When Shakira and football played for education-09/07/2010

09/07/2010

When Shakira and football played for education

Today, 93 million children in the world are denied the chance to go to school. The '1 GOAL, Education for all' campaign uses the power of football to ensure that education for all is a lasting impact of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. It aims to make education a reality for the millions of boys and girls who remain out of school.




Shakira, the Waka Waka girl, joined children from poor African countries and heard about what their lives were like and the impact of their education on their lives during the "1 Goal" campaign. In Kenya, meanwhile, an initiative called 'Moving the Goalspost', or MTG, is sponsoring female students from Kilifi district, where drop-out rates due to early marriages, teen pregnancy and a traditional bias towards educating male siblings over female, are high.

This is what happened when Shakira and football played for education.


Columbian pop queen Shakira meets and speaks to Nthahiseng Tshabala (L), 12 years old from South Africa, Mary Chileshe (3nd R), 14 years old from Zambia and Diane Takawira (2nd R), 13 years old from Zimbabwe as a cameraman holds a microphone above them at Soccer City Stadium in Soweto, a suburb of Johannesburg.

Schoolgirls take part in a football match at Kilifi where the MTG initiative has sponsored female students from Kilifi district where drop-out rates due to early marriages, teen pregnancy and a traditional bias towards educating male siblings over female, are high.


Using the sport of football to recruit pre and teen-aged girls out of school, MTG has managed to maintain hundreds of girls in school whom it also recruits into its all-female soccer teams to compete at district level tournaments that has been populalrly embraced by the local community and changed perceptions on the value of the girl-child.



Estimates by UNICEF place the number of out-of-school children at 93 million the majority of these being girls, and almost 80 per cent of them live in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Source: India Syndicate